


The Trouble with Working with Pirates

by dreamiflame



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Slice of Life, Space Battles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-01
Updated: 2017-07-01
Packaged: 2018-11-17 06:23:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11269797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamiflame/pseuds/dreamiflame
Summary: Rey accepts Han's job offer, and her life goes very differently.





	The Trouble with Working with Pirates

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fleurlb](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fleurlb/gifts).



> I loved your prompt about Rey, Han and Chewie running around as space pirates, fleurlb, and I hope you enjoy this slice of life from their adventures.
> 
> Thanks to my beta for making this better.

Rey rolled out of her bunk still three-quarters of the way asleep and groped for her trousers. She had them on, buttoned, and her feet shoved into her boots before she was more than half awake, and only as she rolled her arm warmers up her forearms did she shake off the remnants of her dream.

_A white world with black trees, something black hunting her- hunting them! Blood red light on the snow, blood on the snow, blood, blood- then blue light, and a sense of peace amid the terror-_

She shook her head as she opened her door. Rey wasn’t on any kind of white world, she was on _The Millennium Falcon_ , and something was wrong. She didn’t know what, exactly, but she could feel it.

Rey heard Chewbacca coming before she spotted him, and she flattened herself against the side of the hall as he rushed by. “Unhappy customers,” he growled to her, and Rey nodded to his back as he swarmed up the ladder to the top guns.

“Kid!” Han’s voice crackled from the intercom, and Rey sprinted up the hall to _the Falcon’s_ cockpit. “Rey! Nap time’s over!”

She swung into the cockpit and Han shot to his feet, dashing past her. 

“Keep us steady!” he yelled over his shoulder, and Rey dropped into the pilot seat, slapping on her restraints. She took a quick look over the instrument panels, noting that they had four pursuers getting close and six more on the way. Stretching a little, she fed the first coordinates she could think of into the navicomputer and set it to calculate.

Rey closed her hands carefully over the controls and jigged to the left, counting seconds in her head. Fifteen for Han to make it down the hall, five to drop down into the lower gun, four to strap in. She gave him the six extra seconds in case he was feeling slow today, then threw the ship into a hard right curve that brought the guns into perfect alignment with the first of their attackers.

Han swore viciously over the intercom. “Warn a guy before you do that,” he grumbled, and the closest attacker on the right exploded.

Chewbacca yowled in triumph.

“Why are we being shot at?” Rey asked, looping and weaving to avoid another hit on the weak spot of their deflector screen. She’d been meaning to sit down and fix it for a week now, but hadn’t gotten to it - as responsive as _the Falcon_ was to fly, things fell apart on her with alarming frequency.

“It’s a long story,” Han said. His shot went wide, but unfortunately for them, dodging him led the pursuer straight into Chewie’s sights.

“They think we sold them bad merchandise,” Chewbacca informed her.

Rey smiled at the stars and threw the ship into a tight spiral turn. “That doesn’t sound like that long a story.” Another of their attackers exploded, and Rey dodged the cloud of expanding gas and fragments.

“ _Did_ we sell them bad merchandise?”

“No!”

“Yes,” Chewie said at the same time, nearly drowning out Han’s protest. “But it wasn’t intentional, our supplier gave us inferior product.”

Han snorted. “And _he_ did it on purpose, but try telling _them_ that.”

The navicomp beeped, and Rey flipped the ship back onto a horizontal axis. “Coordinates set. Going to hyperspace.”

“Punch it, kid!” Han said.

Rey took a deep breath and pulled back the hyperdrive handle. The ship seemed to gather herself for a moment, then the stars blurred into long white streaks and they leapt forward, away from their pursuers.

Chewbacca yowled a victory song, and Rey sagged back in the pilot’s seat in relief. “Nice flying, kid,” Han said in her ear, just like he always did. “Come on back here, we’ll have breakfast.”

Her stomach rumbled, still not used to the idea of enough food, every day, without having to slave away for it. Rey unfastened her restraints. “I’ll be right there,” she said, and reached up to check their transmitter. Han had taught her a lot of fascinating ways to throw off pursuit, and she wanted to make sure anyone trying to trace their trip through hyperspace would end up several parsecs away from where _The Falcon_ did. 

“Can we have luum fruit?”

Han scoffed. “Again? We had that yesterday!”

“I like luum fruit,” Chewie growled at him.

“Fine, fine, since I’m clearly outnumbered _again_ , we can have luum fruit,” Han grumbled, but Rey could hear the fondness in his tone below the bluster.

Satisfied that they weren’t going to come out of hyperspace into the same situation they’d fled from (or worse), Rey set the ship to auto and stood up to stretch.

She wondered sometimes what her life would have been like if she’d refused Han’s job offer, and gone back to Jakku. Would her parents have finally returned? Rey didn’t think so.

Or maybe she could have gone with Finn when he left. But he’d been so frightened, so terribly afraid, and as nice as he’d been, Rey didn’t feel up to taking care of anyone else but herself.

And she liked it here, on _the Falcon_ , with Han and Chewbacca. She had enough to eat, she had a room of her own, and no one expected her to spend hours scavenging to earn a few mouthfuls.

She hit the door open latch to leave the cockpit, and tried not to bounce too much on her way to the galley. Han hated bouncing. But Rey was sure that right here, right now, was the best of all possible worlds for her.

Even if Han would interrupt her naps by trying to get them all killed.

Chewbacca growled out a warning for her to hurry. “I’m coming!” she called back, and rushed down the corridor to have breakfast with her family.


End file.
